Re: Announcing the Fedora EDU Spin Preview

From: José Matos <jamatos fc up pt>

To: fedora-devel-list redhat com

Subject: Re: Announcing the Fedora EDU Spin Preview

Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:50:40 +0100

On Thursday 10 July 2008 21:27:37 Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> Preview
> binaries are great, because it shows that these particular Spin
> developers are making their best effort to get this working and tested
> so when it comes time to approve things that conversation should go
> smoothly.
The question is a sense more general than just spins, other than the kde
packages from kde-redhat that I use I have previously used other repositories
from packages intended to be previews of next version of Fedora but released
to the current stable release.
>From the top of my head I remember:
- python 2.5
- texlive (to replace tetex)
- emacs 22 (?)
- kernel (Dave had his repository working for some time)
I am sure that there were more, the funny part is that those repositories were
not "official" - for any definition of official, although the maintainers were
the Fedora maintainers of the respective packages. So the need of those
repositories is understood but they are stealth as they fall out of the radar.
I would have expected that by now we had some kind of mechanism to deal with
such cases other than the non-official stance of every of those repositories.
I am aware of the perils involved, the existence of another level of testing
with the resulting lack of attention for rawhide, or even the inter-
compatibility of said repositories (although this has never a concern in
practice, any problem was quickly identified and fixed).
So I would like to see a figure of separate projects that still fall under the
umbrella of Fedora, that track experimental packages over the current stable
version.
The whole process should be run by FESCO on a basis to basis case. This would
avoid the situation that we have now where we have hybrids (repositories) that
are neither Fedora but they are created exclusively with the single purpose of
testing packages for future inclusion in Fedora. Schizophrenic seems like a
good description of the current behavior. ;-)
--
José Abílio